Colm Tóibín - Author HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk. I'm Stephen Sackur.

My guest today is an Irish writer whose intense, lyrical novels have

won him awards, acclaim and most importantly millions

Colm Toibin isn't so much a flamboyant storyteller, he's more

an acute observer of character and the deepest human feelings.

There are recurring themes in his work ` loss, mourning, exile,

which might suggest a dark, brooding presence ` but how close

Colm Toibin, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you.

Your writing is deeply rooted in Ireland and yet you spend much of

You teach in America, you have homes in Europe...

Does it help or hinder you that you now have quite a lot of distance

I think I live in my mind and in my memory and something can

And I come in and out of Ireland, so it is a really funny thing that

happens when you arrive at JFK in the Irish sector, which is to

say, you get the flight to Dublin, and you suddenly see the Irish.

So many of us live in America. There are so many Irish.

We are going home for the first time in a year

and there's a funny sense of belonging in two countries

People get very comfortable with the air hostesses with Irish accents.

And then you arrive in Ireland and you think,

"If I could get out of here tomorrow morning..."

When you join that line at JFK Airport in New York

and you're in the Irish section, as you put it, do you feel

I can recognise every gesture, every halftone in the conversation.

I see a couple coming towards me and I can tell you where they're from.

You are as utterly Irish today as you ever were?

If someone spoke in a northern accent, a Dublin accent or a Wexford

Fintan O'Toole, another great Irish writer and commentator,

says emigration and exile, the journeys to and

from home, are the very heartbeat of Irish culture.

For 150 years, it has been the secret history of the country.

lost two or three people to immigration.

If you went to America or Australia, you often never came home.

If you went to England, you did come home but somehow your

children had English accents but their cousins had Irish accents.

Even in the difficult years between Ireland and England, the families

The big difference was if you went to America,

you could become anybody, you could become a millionaire.

Your descendants could become president,

But in England, you could not become queen.

There was legislation to prevent you.

America was glamour and England was work.

I wonder if in your experience and maybe for yourself as well, when you

are an Irish person abroad, you tend to romanticise and look very fondly

back at the homeland but maybe when you go back, once again, you

remember the frustrations and the difficulties and some of the

I teach a course at Columbia University on Irish literature.

Of course, the literature is so gloomy.

It's so filled with death and melancholy and houses burning.

and it is very nice and people are very friendly

but all this literature is so filled with darkness."

And if you're studying the literature with students and you

offer a sort of background, you are looking at a darkened Ireland.

It's not an ideal. No writer has idealised Ireland.

People find the darkest things about the country and dramatise them.

When we talk dark and melancholy, there are lot those qualities

For our audience who don't know your personal story,

I want to relate that to your own upbringing in Ireland.

Your father died when you were 12, I think, and I wonder whether...

I mean, it's easy to assume in a sense that

that coloured a lot of your personality.

Loss and mourning figure in your work a lot

and clearly, as a child losing your dad, that marked you forever.

I think in those years, especially in the 1950s and the years before

it was the silence that affected you more than the event itself.

No`one knew how to... How to talk about it.

"It will be OK. Children get over things quickly.

Well, they don't, obviously. These days we know that.

There are counsellors and systems in place.

I became interested in the poetics of silence.

What silence does is in the words not said,

the sense of something that can never be mentioned again.

And in fiction, you can really work with that because you can show

the reader what the person is thinking and then you can show

the reader what the person is saying

and the big distance between the two.

A lot of this world must really be kept within.

And maybe the most obvious and best example of that

in your work is the most recent novel you have written,

which you invite us to see as very much autobiographical.

It's about a woman who has lost her husband

just like your mother lost her husband.

It's also about the relationship between the woman and her son,

who, frankly, sounds very much like you.

Is it autobiographical? Yes.

was trying to describe those years in a provincial town

with a family where the father dies and the house is empty.

There is a palpable absence and nobody knows what to do about it.

It's not a ghost, it's just that nobody is there

If you wrote it from a child's perspective,

A short Irish story where a boy is sad.

I didn't know how to deal with it until I realised, of course,

I watched my mother in those years so closely and I can remember

everything she said and what was wearing, the things that she had,

and I could tell it from her point of view because I was watching her

so closely that I had a sense of what her point of view was.

For example, this is a woman who as her husband was dying,

the fictional Nora Webster, she sends her youngest boys off to

live with an aunt and she doesn't contact them for months on end.

Yes, my mother did that. Are you angry?

Well, the telephone was not used very much

She really needed to be with my father and he needed her.

We were sent to a safe place where we were perfectly safe, of course,

And I think it affected myself and my brother very deeply.

And of course, I became the novelist, so I'm the one who

and try and see it from her point of view rather than from ours.

But then slowly, you do see it from the boy's point of view.

The novel was not an act of revenge in any way.

I don't think I was ever angry, really, but I wanted to use it.

I was exploiting it, getting that material and going,

"I can put it here to get this story right

You pick away at emotions and they develop and they change slowly and

it makes me think that because of the density of the way you write,

you must be quite an introspective, maybe even quite

Am I right or is that a silly way of using the author's work as a

I think there are two ways to look at it.

Personally, it's very bad manners to go around being melancholy.

Even Hamlet got fed up with doing it and started being funny

"I would like to integrate the fact

that when I go out at night, I'm really cheerful and enjoy things

and this other part of me is this brooding guy

The psychiatrist said, "Which would you like to be?"

And I said I didn't know and he said, "Go away."

In other words, I think it is quite normal

for someone who's funny in print to be very sad when you meet them.

You know, the sad clown ` we know that one.

She wrote quite melancholy stuff about death and time

It's not as if her novels are funny.

But personally, people said she was absolutely hilarious.

She once said TS Eliot came around wearing a four`piece suit.

She would make jokes about people she knew

And I'm interested in that idea that the private self and the public self

Is this not just about you but also about Ireland?

You said something that struck me as fascinating

about the importance often in human exchanges being in the silence.

Do you think Ireland has long been a country of repressed feeling,

of silences, rather than things said explicitly?

I think there is a great deal of talk in Ireland.

We're constantly telling stories and things but I certainly realised

after my father died and I have watched it happening since,

our people suddenly being so entertaining at a time when they are

Something inwards that is eating them away inside.

There is a lot of death in your books.

There is quite a lot of sex in the short stories.

It is quite explicit. I had fun writing it.

I really should write more sex as time goes on and we are becoming

Even as a young man, as a child growing into an adult, you knew that

you were homosexual but you did not in the Ireland of the time...

It was not decriminalised until '93.

So, I'm just wondering for example, at school...

Because you went to school, and we'll talk a bit about it,

it was run by priests and sexuality was not an open topic.

How did you cope with your growing awareness of who you were?

the closet is actually quite a comfortable place.

It's dark and there is no`one else there.

You just keep that part of yourself utterly compartmentalised.

Obviously, when I went to university,

there were people who were there... I had a group of friends who knew.

I never took that home. That was a common thing in Ireland.

Your friends knew and some family knew and then not all

of your family and then gradually someone would tell someone else.

But that big coming out moment did not happen in my generation

in Ireland in the same way that it happened in the US, for example.

Going back to your senior school, St Peters in Wexford, we now

know, although I guess you did not know or were not fully aware at

the time, that it was a place where a number of senior clerics, priests,

were serially sexually abusing some of the boys in the school.

Again, I wonder whether you subconsciously were

It was unimaginable that priests who later went to jail, the full details

that were published precisely what they did...

It was systematic and long`term and I knew these priests

For all of us, it was really difficult to read this material

all these years later and to realise...

"When he says he went up those stairs into that room,

You really did not know anything?

I had no idea that a priest would take their clothes off

The idea of adults and children in any sphere

was something I had never heard about.

You have written about it very interestingly since

I think that at one point, you tried to get inside the mind of the priest

and you said that in a way, if we assume they were not

homosexual but heterosexual and we assume for a minute that they were

in a school full of young girls aged between 12 and 20,

we wouldn't be surprised if from time to time

they...they...expressed desires and fell from the standards

In a way, people were shocked by that because it almost felt

like you were trying to find excuses for these abusive priests.

I was trying to think about things from their point of view.

The whole society moved from loving priests and listening to them

to hating them and thinking that they were all the same.

I just find that when a society moves so quickly from one

The school also had a seminary attached to it

so I got to know some of the seminarians.

A lot of the boys went in at 17 or 18 to become priests and they were

homosexual and one reason why they went in was because if you are gay,

part of you becomes much more internalised.

You move inwards and that can hit a spiritual space.

And for a lot of the priests, nothing happened until their 40s.

They went through 20 years with the celibacy

and then something broke in their 40s, some loneliness.

And the sexuality, if it has to be kept silent

and cannot be mentioned, it can become really twisted

People can move from being normal gay people to actually having all

sorts of things that include getting pleasure from power.

What has resulted from this is a fundamental undermining of the power

Is that irrevocable and is the positive?

The Church has lost its moral authority

The only way it can move is in the spiritual realm.

If it continues to try and move things in

the civil space trying to continue with schools and hospitals, telling

people how to vote in referendums, it will not help them in any way.

The only way it can work is talking about prayer and the spirit and God

and the Bible and things that matter.

You were brought up as an observant Catholic.

Is there a spiritual element to you still?

I think there is a spiritual element to all of us

You get much more than the pleasure of the melody.

I wonder if all of us do not have a need

For me, it would not be Catholic dogma.

Any of us who have read The Testament

The novel you wrote, it is fascinating.

But for a Catholic, it is challenging.

You get inside the head of Mary herself and write her view

of what happened before and during the crucifixion.

The message of Mary is a lot of the story is a lie.

She was told to say she was by the disciples who are creating

It is a view that many Catholics found very difficult to take.

American Catholics seemed most disturbed about it.

Her supporters seem to think it was a good thing.

She was there for the crucifixion in my book.

When I read it, I have in my mind about all religious

They use experience for their own ends and try to create

Was it a critique of not just Catholicism, but Islam today?

That individual figure being chosen by the group to die.

How that would be viewed by somebody without that pressure.

I was thinking about the relationship between the big cause

Trying to work that out using her voice

I would work on her voice and see where it took me.

Goading them is not a particularly brilliant thing to do.

That sounds like what Peter Carey said.

At the same time, once murder is involved,

once you start going into the offices of people who do drawings

and write cartoons and you murder them, we are in a different realm.

You can have an argument with Charlie Hebdo about the content.

Once there is murder the only argument you want to have

is what the people who murdered them want to say to them.

Once the murders happen, I am in a different space.

I am absolutely on the side of Charlie Hebdo.

I want to end by coming back to Ireland and another campaign

You adamantly support the idea that Ireland should

Nobody says to somebody else, civil partnerships will do for you.

It is strong about the protection married people have and the family

How you couple, how you make your love public and

how you have the ritual surrounding that is fundamental to all of us.

I am not saying everyone should get married, but to be told you can't

in a country where a ritual is very important is exclusionary.

Because this is in the Constitution, there had to be a referendum,

and one government minister came out as gay, one ex`minister came out as

But the arguments, it was a very decent campaign.

It meant that we could put our case to the nation and say,

We do not want to stop marriage, we want to embrace marriage.

They are ready to accept dissent and difference.

Two Northern Ireland, western parts of Scotland. Through the course of

the night, it will stay dry. Here are,